We’ve Moved from Bluehost. If You Use WordPress, You Should Move, Too.

Going to this blog’s home page resulted in at least 10 seconds of wait time until yesterday. That’s the day we moved it from Bluehost hosting service to One World Hosting.

We recommend that anyone — make that everyone — who uses WordPress blogging software for their site move ASAP from Bluehost. They are just too damn slow!

WordPress blogs and sites take more CPU power to deliver than simple HTML-based sites. Every time someone asks for a page, WordPress rebuilds the page you see with a script. There is some remembering (caching) of recently delivered pages, but, basically, the hosting servers have to do more work for a WordPress site than they do for a vanilla HTML site.

But, Bluehost compounds the need for CPU resources by penalizing sites that need more computer power by denying them even average access to the CPU. Bluehost has server software that “throttles” sites that use more power than an arbitrary amount of CPU time Bluehost has decided is reasonable. This means that your visitors have to wait extra seconds for your WordPress-created pages to be shown to them because your site is consciously denied CPU time by Bluehost.

Bluehost says they “throttle” sites that use too much CPU power so that other sites on the same shared server do not suffer.

The concept is fair in theory. Someone could code scripts that run in a loop or otherwise hog the computer. But, Bluehost is catching vanilla WordPress sites in its resource rationing. This blog — and another client blog I hosted at Bluehost — use standard WordPress themes and plug-ins. There’s no custom code or exotic functionality that requires an abnormal or unfair amount of computer power. They shouldn’t be penalized for using too much of the computer.

When I wrote Bluehost support about the site’s slowness, they explained their company’s throttling was automatic and said that debugging my WordPress site to discover which plug-in or function was causing the excessive resource demand was beyond their free service to clients. They sent me links so I could buy consulting services to discover why and where I was using more CPU time than Bluehost thought I should.

No thanks.

Casual WordPress users, using pretty standard functionality, should not have to analyze — or pay to have someone else analyze — their use of a hosting service’s resources.

Thus far I have moved WordPress sites to One World Hosting and Webmasters.com. The speed of the copies on these two hosting services was much, much better than it was on Bluehost.

Since site speed affects Google’s ranking of your pages, WordPress sites really need to migrate away from Bluehost and its throttling.

One Reply to “We’ve Moved from Bluehost. If You Use WordPress, You Should Move, Too.”

I’ve had some problems at Webmasters.com installing WordPress in other than the root directory. Their tech support says that addon domains are limited functionality, which doesn’t fully explain all the issues in Webmasters.com installation scripts.

I think I’ll be using One World Hosting for new WordPress sites, at least for awhile.